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Populism

When I was younger I was constantly wary of political discussions. This was partly my anxiety but also a feeling that I was young and inexperienced and hadn’t worked everything out yet. Looking back I get the impression that I understood things better than many and was quite needlessly anxious. I am now happy to engage in discussions and even hopeful someone will raise an argument that will make me thing again.

Looking back my family also surprise me. Half of my family are Tories and they never made the effort to explain the conservative argument to me. I just got the impression that I would get it when I was older. Yet I had always got it, it just didn’t tally with what the UK government was doing at the time.

I did grow up to be interested in science and am hopefully capable of analysing issues rigorously. Probably all scientists wake up at some point and realise that most people don’t do this. Scientists don’t decide elections, people who haven’t done the analysis do. The problem with democracy is that people elect people who make the right noises and thus satisfy people that they are on their side and understand their concerns. Sadly the modern politician is adept at creating the impression rather than being a good analyser and decision maker.

We now have the draft Brexit deal, but it seems few are happy. This was what a slim majority after a very poor debate wanted wasn’t it? It’s very confusing. I think the problem is a lack of proper analysis. A simple conclusion is reached that ‘feels right’ and if you also feel part of a majority then why look deeper?

The UK is in decline. I think it is quite natural for societies in decline to look back to the past and look for what was better in the past and what has changed to see if a beneficial tradition has been dropped. In contrast a rising society may look back and see what is now better about the society.

sometimes i think that Brexit goes somethign like this: The UK is in decline. There are more people from the rest of the EU than there used to be. Therefore the UK is in decline because of immigration from the EU. So, to reverse the decline the UK should reduce immigration from the EU, hence Brexit.

Now of course, there isn’t necessarily any connection between the two premises, so there is no logical path to the conclusion. It may very well leave to a false positive, a correlation that fits the facts, but has no real connection with them.

However if you look deeply enough there is a connection. A society that relies on importing labour for specific jobs vital to the economy is not in a sustainable position. That the Brexiteers never talk about this, suggests that they simply want the false conclusion ‘feel right’ so that they support Brexit. It’s not somethign that should happen in a healthy democracy.

The other aspect of this looking back to the past for answers is that it raises nostalgia for periods of the past. Last week was the centenary of the end of the First World War. There was a focus on how united Britain was about entering that war, how easily Britons enlisted into the armed services to fight for ‘King and Country’ in a way that is unforeseeable in modern Britain. This notion of a united Britain is appealing.

What simply galls me is that Brexit is the antithesis of promoting unity. It’s been the most divisive political issue and bringing that discussion into the open has been damaging to British society. The EU is by no means perfect and I’ve always argued for a looser set of arrangements, however the EU is not the cause of what ails Britain, the Brexit argument is a false positive. A genuinely united nation which works towards the goal of re-building British society is the alternative and all this Brexit division and mess is just a distraction form the real work the UK needs to embark upon. The Brexiteers have scapegoated those whom oppose them as the problem, it’s a form of fascism. They who are wealthy enough to not be bothered about a decline in the British economy.

We need to re-build democracy from the bottom up and this is very much not what the chief proponents of Brexit want, they haven’t even bothered to make any sort of case for how to improve Britain outside of the EU. We need more people to look beyond the first simple answer that at first glance appears to address the problem and ‘feels right’. The world is much more complicated than that and we simply need genuine politicians who care about the whole of the economy and society who are not simply populists or public relations experts.

A lot of fuss has been made about the suggestion of a post-Brexit allowing such things as chlorine chicken onto UK shop shelves. The issue is indicative of the perils of international trade deals potential to override democratic control.

The issue also exemplifies the separation of truth and perception. There is a kind of mob-rule going on, where the mainstream media perpetuate a myth and truth isn’t arrived at. People say ‘people don’t trust experts anymore’, but this is partly because experts are misrepresented by the media. Clickbait, a catchy headline to get people to a page is more important than good content.

As a scientist, the misrepresentation of science in general irritates me. The popular media refrain of ‘Science says’ is nonsense, Science doesn’t say anything. Science is a means of answering questions through undertaking experiments to establish if there is a relationship between things or not. Often the conversation goes something like this:

S: Ah ok, you want to know if chlorine chicken is has similar effects as a poison?

M: Yes

S: Okay we’ll look into it…

Okay, No, chlorine chicken is not like a poison.

M: Thankyou, so the answer is that Chlorine Chicken is safe .

S: Yes, if you define safe as not being poisonous.

The media then announce to the world that chlorine chicken has been scientifically proved to be completely safe.

Society: Really, science says that chlorine chicken is completely safe? what about long-term effects of such a diet. We don’t agree, we have lost trust in science.

Science: Hang on media, we didn’t say that it was completely safe, all we established was that it wasn’t a poison, using your very narrow definition of safe, there may be long term effects on health of introducing chlorine chicken into human diets, there is indeed some evidence that this is the case and…

Media: Sorry Science, that wasn’t what we asked and we haven’t time to discuss it, you’ve done your job and we’re too busy writing articles attacking people who are against chlorine chicken.

Scientists: Face… Palm.

So trade deals can then be set up, with their own judicial systems, that don’t allow actual safety to be an excuse for not being able to freely trade dangerous food or machinery, because they ticked the box of scientific testing, even if that testing was fairly meaningless.

This is why CETA, TTIP and potential UK post-Brexit “free trade” deals are a concern. The great Brexit irony of taking back control only to give away more control than was lost through membership of the EU.

Rather than society decide it’s own rules, that power is given up to corporations, who are only concerned with making money. The people in the corporations may have moral scruples, but these are very easily side-tracked in the fast pace of business, which is why we have regulations in the first place. Regulations so we don’t all have to spend money on our own research over whether a product is safe or not, with regulations that need only be done once, scientifically, through resolving exhaustive lists of questions.

Chlorine chicken is the pertinent example, it should not be brushed aside, because resolving the issue allows everything else to be more easily resolved. It doesn’t effect me because I’m never going to eat it.

I used to hate waiting for buses. It was the not knowing how long you had to wait, whether it was worth getting my book out, whether I had time to pop to the local shop, an answer to whether the bus had been cancelled so I could go to the pub for a pint or two whilst waiting for the next one. Often these days you can use an app’ on your phones which will tell you where the bus really is and how long it will be, which solves all these problems of lost time waiting and makes bus travel a lot less annoying.

Unfortunately there is not an app’ for the UK government. Brexit is like waiting for the bus that never comes; We know the service will be crap but at least we may soon be on the ruddy thing and we are no longer waiting.

We are in this strange Brexit zone. No-one talks about Brexit anymore, I think we are all fed up of going through the same tired arguments yet again, the arguments that frustratingly never get around to their logical conclusion. There doesn’t seem much we can go about it and we don’t want to open up those divisive arguments again. Of course we do make lots of jokes about how pathetic the UK is being by not having a Brexit plan and trying to wing it and keep the important electoral demographics happy during the process, rather than formulate sensible policy. I’m sure those outside the UK are making the exact same jokes.

It’s not only Brexit fatigue, it’s this whole three year period whilst the UK negotiates Brexit on the fly, with no plan of what to do with it. We kind of want to know what will happen at the end so we can start preparing for it and start thinking about how to adapt to it. We are waiting again without knowing when the bus will turn up. With this Tory UK government having decided to take all the responsibility for Brexit and secured government by a gnat’s wing to do so, there seems little to do but get on with our lives in the meantime.

When and indeed if Brexit does happen, I expect the vast majority of people to be disappointed, only a particularly bizarre few are going to get what they want. The big issues of the “debate” over Brexit of immigration and better regulations are not going to be tackled as there is unlikely to be any agreement of how best to resolve these problems. Of course we could actually have a debate, work through the issues and come up with sensible policies, but that isn’t how the British state works. The EU doesn’t work that way either of course, but is perhaps less likely to do anything truly daft, which was always my argument for remain; that the UK can and should do more to sort out our problems rather than waste years on Brexit with no plan for post-Brexit.

I am still aware of all the problems with the EU: economic migrancy, regulations that don’t really apply and are a hindrance to the UK economy, the Eurozone holding back the economies of Southern Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) etc. The problem with Brexit was that acknowledging these problems but not offering an alternative, not looking at what the alternatives are, the arguments never got beyond this beginning of forming an argument, taking the first premise as a conclusion. A great weakness of the EU was failing to sort out the CAP. The CAP was a strong argument for Brexit, however the UK has not promised to replace it with anything better, instead suggesting that agriculture won’t get any subsidies, but don’t worry we can import lovely unhealthy foods like chlorine chicken and hormone beef from the US, making food regulation even more complicated. How is this better than staying in the EU?

The other powerful Brexit argument was that the UK would never be offered a choice on the EU again, so Brexit should be voted for to give Britain the chance for modern democracy and reform of our failing institutions. However instead of preparing for this, instead we hear about binding ourselves to a different set of damaging “free trade” deals.

We know that both of the major Uk political parties are slaves to their focus groups, rather than what is best for economy. Tory Bliar’s [Tony Blair] “Labour” government, only implemented limited devolution to gain votes and the Tories only had Brexit to win an election as well. Britain just needs to end this ghastly Westminster system, have true democracy and that means Wales getting to decide it’s own affairs, rather than decided by these two lots of political careerists.

Much of the motivation for Brexit was hope, hope for new systems that actually worked and performed their function to be developed, rather than continual decline in living standards. Paradoxically, the only way for Brexit to work is bring Westminster government crashing down and allow genuine reform from the bottom up. We are still waiting for that but anxious that that day may never come.

I may have been a little unfair when i laid blame at the feet of Liberals. The true curse is populism. We seem to be a world of peak populism, with votes for Brexit and Trump. Bizarrely both of these campaigns focused their attacks on the establishment, which in itself is a populist construction. so, really the argument runs that the solution to the problem of populism is er… even more populism. The facetious populist claim of the ‘will of the people’ is really the will of populism.

As an outsider I generally do not value popularity. Some popular people i know are popular, through sheer luck, rather than from a desire to be popular. Perhaps it is the desire to be popular that is what is wrong with populism. Where there is popular [majority] support, that is not populism, that is consensus.

Anyone who spends a significant amount of time musing over politics, eventually runs into the thorny problem of populism. Allow me to describe the individual’s political progress:

Politics is essentially a subject. A subject that concerns theories of how society and the economy work with a view to exploring ways to make things better. After some time exploring politics in this academic way most people coalesce around a political position or political philosophy. What fascinated me, and I believe most people who think about politics is that everybody reaches their own consensus about the best way to improve things, but we all end up in different places, but share many things in common. you then start to notice subtle differences in how other people think which leads them to different political places. Whilst we may vehemently disagree with someone we nonetheless enjoy the rigorous debate and often friendships are formed. These friendships unite around the shared disdain for populists.

Of course, having done all this fevered thinking and finally reaching reasonably robust conclusions, we would like to actually put it into practice and make our economies better. For many politically minded this involves becoming active in political parties. Often democracy is seen as a sensible way of finding consensus and solutions that work reasonably well for most of a population. At this point the politically minded discover that they themselves are a minority, that most people do not concern themselves with politics, that democracy doesn’t really work terribly well. Because most people haven’t taken an interest in politics and flit from one position to another as the superficial ends of arguments that agitate around the general public sphere.

For example, immigration, the issue which dominated the Brexit and Trump campaigns. High levels of net immigration are not good for an economy. They are a symptom of a poorly functioning economy. The populists focus all the attention on immigration rather than the root causes of the problems and by doing so create the impression that the immigrants are the problem , rather than innocent pawns of a bad system. There are two main reasons why immigration is a problem. Firstly lack of resources, in a bad economy resources become more difficult to obtain and these resources are essentially to a well functioning economy. The immigrants merely highlight the problem of a lack of housing, education or healthcare, as they need to use these scant resources too. The immigrants appear to make a bad situation even worse. Secondly this lack of resources means that the native population lack the ability to perform economically crucial roles, hence immigrants move into that society to plug the gaps instead of the real issues being tackled. Hence the political person will be aware of the real causes, whilst the populist will focus on the symptoms.

The trouble is often that the populists win, they win elections, they get to hold office. However we hold them is disdain because they are inconsistent, they have no solid political framework or political creed that links all their positions, they are charlatans. We become particularly intense when they claim to be ‘one of us’, from our political neck of the woods, so we seethe with frustration, that they are not truly one of us and more importantly that they besmirch the name of our political philosophy. For example, Tony Blair was regarded as a Social Democrat, so his governments record is often attacked as exemplifying why ‘Social Democracy is wrong’. The issue being that Blair wasn’t a Social Democrat at all, he just disguised himself in the clothes. The same is true of Conservatives who disdain those who wear the clothes of the right and Socialists disdain those who wear their clothes.

The thing is that in the UK, the populists have been in charge. The thing is the political class have long realised that in order to win an election that they must wear the populists clothes. Instead of advertising how they would improve things the focus is on being seen to be on the side of the populist argument, even when the populist argument is merely treating a symptom, which then allows the real problem to surface elsewhere in the economy. This lust to win power then takes over policy. Traditionally populism was merely for the campaign trail and the sensible thought through evidence based consensus policies would be implemented in government. However in modern times, populism has infected policy, so policy no longer tackles the underlying issues. Party politics has become a game about winning power, rather than using power to makes things better. And then come Brexit, where the UK government seek to satisfy the perceived popular will, for somethign they didn’t even have a poorly thought through policy for in the first place and merely ride the populist tide, forming positions retrospectively.

Something has to give, the populist bubble has to burst or we end up with even more extremes of populism than Trump or Brexit or bust.

For me the solution is bottom up democracy and proportional voting systems where democracy actually functions as it should, rather than society following the whims of the populist swirl and those who can best manipulate them for their own ends. As i’ve said before for me, from my long political journey, from root causes the answer is autonomy for regions like Wales and not the frippery of a symptomatic nationalism, that divides us from ourselves.